AirMozilla video

The council is excited to share with you, our second group of new Mozilla Rep Mentors this Year.

These are Reps council has recognized as being equally good at inspiring and empowering others, as they are leading globally and locally in their communities.

As mentorship is core to the program, we are very grateful they have agreed to take on this new responsibility.

A crucial role in the Mozilla Reps ecosystem is that of a mentor. We strive for every Rep to become a mentor for the program to become self-sustaining and for Reps to play a central role in our ambitious goals for growing and enabling the Mozilla Community. We’ve just accepted eight new mentors, bringing the current total to 54.

Mozilla Reps recognizes that our primary goals are best reached through the support, encouragement, and empowerment of community through mentorship. Mentoring is a process for the informal transmission of knowledge, made possible through regular and supportive interaction.

We encourage mentors to be as open to learning from their mentees, as they are to teaching, for the benefit and growth of both individuals and the program as a whole.

She has always been an inspiration of enthusiasm for the Mozilla community worldwide. Her proactive nature of getting things done has motivated Reps throughout. Being the part of Mozilla Romania Community, Ioana helps out anyone and everyone who wants to learn and make the web better. Spreading around Mozillian News through Social Media accounts of Mozilla Romania Community she enjoys helping the SUMO community. An emboldening persona in Womoz, Ioana encourage women participation in tech.

During the last few months, Ioana has been organizing and participating in several events to promote Mozilla like FOSDEM, OSOM, and also to involve more women into Free/Open Source communities and Mozilla through WoMoz initiative, highly involved in Mozilla QA helping to smash as many bugs as possible in several Mozilla products.

Ioana is now driving the Buddy Up QA Pilot program, which aims to recruit and train community members to actively own testing of this project.

Also we welcome Ioana as a Peer of the Reps Module and congratulate her for being the Rep of the Month!

Thanks Ioana for all you do for the the Reps, Mozilla and the Open Web.

AirMozilla video

When the new participation plan was forming one of the first questions was: how can the Reps program enable more and deeper participation in Mozilla? We know that Reps are empowering local and regional communities and have been playing an important role in various project like Firefox OS launches, but there wasn’t an organized and more importantly scalable way to provide support to functional teams at Mozilla. The early attempts of the program to help connect volunteers with functional areas were the Special Interest Groups (SIG). Although in some cases and for some periods of time the SIGs worked very well and were impactful, they wasn’t sustainable in the long run. We couldn’t provide a structure that ensured mutual benefit and commitment.

With the renewed focus on participation we’re trying to think differently about the way that Reps can connect to functional teams, align with their goals and participate in every part of Mozilla. And this is where the “Impact teams” come in. Instead of forming loose interest groups, we want to form teams that work well together and are defined by the impact they are having, as well as excited by future opportunity to not only have deeper participation but personal growth as part of a dedicated team where colleagues include project staff.

The idea of these new impact teams is to make sure that the virtuous circle of mutual benefit is created. This means that we will work with functional teams to ensure that we find participation opportunities for volunteers that have direct impact on project goals, but at the same time we make sure that the volunteers will benefit from participating, widening their skills, learning new ones.

These teams will crystallize through the work on concrete projects, generating immediate impact for the team, but also furthering the skills of volunteers. That will allow the impact team to take on bigger challenges with time: both volunteers and functional teams will learn to collaborate and volunteers with new skills will be able to take the lead and mentor others.

We’re of course at the beginning and many questions are still open. How can we organize this in an agile way? How can we make this scalable? Will the scope of the role of Reps change if they are more integrated in functional activities? How can we make sure that all Mozillians, Reps and non Reps are part of the teams? Will we have functional mentors? And we think the only way to answer those questions is to start trying. That’s why we’re talking to different functional areas, trying to find new participation opportunities that provide value for volunteers. We want to learn by doing, being agile and adjusting as we learn.

The impact teams are therefore not set in stone, we’re working with different teams, trying loose structures and specially putting our energy into making this really beneficial for both functional teams and volunteers. Currently we are working to the Marketplace team, the Firefox OS Market research team and the developer relations team. And we’ll be soon reaching out to Mozillians and Reps who have a track record in those areas to ask them to help us build these impact teams.

We’re just at the beginning of a lot of pilots, tests, prototypes. But we’re excited to start moving fast and learn! We have plenty of work to do and many questions to answer, join us in shaping these new impact teams. Specially help us now how your participation at Mozilla can benefit your life, make you grow, learn, develop yourself. Emma Irwin is working on making education a centerpiece of participation, but do you have any other ideas? Share them with us!

This story started in 2011. A group of passionate Mozillians created the Reps program, their goal was to empower Mozilla volunteers all around the world to support the Mozilla mission. They provided visibility to the work of volunteers, created process to have access to resources and a better way to communicate within the community and with staff. It was the Reps themselves, especially the Council and the mentors who shaped this program. Now, counting 457 Reps, the program has evolved to be a powerful platform for community building where leaders from all around the world can emerge.

The Reps program proved to be very successful in building healthy local and regional communities. It also provided a structured connection to Mozilla functional activities when the work is inherently regional, for example with the Firefox OS launches. But as Mozilla grew and became more professional it was harder for volunteers to participate in the global nature of the project: volunteers could run local and regional activities much more easily, but participating in projects aimed at global impact became increasingly difficult.

Now fast Forward to 2015: We have a new participation plan that aims to bring back the balance and revive the participatory nature of Mozilla. Mark Surman’s blog post is a great read: we don’t only want to enable more participation but we want this participation to have value both for Mozilla and for the individual volunteers. And that means that we will empower many more volunteers to take the lead and participate much more deeply in Mozilla to have both local and global impact.

And here is where Reps come in. Our challenge is to make Mozilla much more participatory again, to partner with functional areas and take the lead. To make this successful in the long run we will work on new participation and leadership pathways connecting with functional teams. And we will work on the things that matter the most and make a difference. These pathways will of course provide more opportunities for personal and collective development as well as new leadership opportunities for Mozillians and Reps.

How will this be different from the past? We used to have “Special Interest Groups”, loose groups with an interest in a functional area, but not too many concrete projects or learning opportunities. We want to build on what was working there but shift to “Impact teams”: teams of staff and volunteers who will work hand in hand and where volunteers will be able to get real value out of their participation and will have a clear leadership pathway.

This new approach brings of course a whole new set of challenges: we’ll need to rethink the way we organize the Reps program, the way we empower Reps, mentors and Council and the way we do things in general. Education will be a fundamental part of this. We will need to work all together, Council, Mentors and Reps, to make this happen. And although it will be a lot of hard work I couldn’t be more excited for the changes coming: we’ll be investing so much energy and resources in empowering volunteers and offering new avenues for personal development while having a tangible impact bringing the Mozilla mission forward. I think 2015 will be a great year for Mozilla and the Reps program, join us in shaping this third era of Mozilla and writing the next chapter of the Mozilla Reps history.